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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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I
still remember the endorphin rush as my thirteen-year-old fist pounded my
little brother who had just told me, with bratty officiousness, that I should
not be eating Mom's fruitcake. (Fruitcake!!) Even at the time, I was horrified
at my exhilaration, desisting only because I feared that the pleasure of each
punch might push me to the point of seriously injuring the eight-year-old
howling at my feet. I have no recollection whether my mother found out about
the fight— or the fruitcake. The memory, instead, inscribes my potential for
violence: a potential that per­haps more of us need to consider as we re­member
the incidents of September 11 and re­gard in dismay the escalating violence in
the Middle East.

Unfortunately,
when many of us think of vengeance, we attribute it primarily to people of countries
"less civilized" than our own. Even when we consider homegrown
vendettas, we usually distance ourselves by associating them with identifiable
ethnic subcultures, or as a problem of the rural and urban poor. For this very
reason, more people need to see Changing Lanes, one of the most
interesting and critically acclaimed (though little seen) films of this past summer.
Recently released on video and DVD, Changing Lanes is a parable about
the overpow­ering attraction of vengeance, even to well-edu­cated upper-class
American professionals—a parable that gets more relevant with each news­paper
dropped into the recycling bin.

The
opening shots of the movie create dise­quilibrium as the camera delivers a
headlight-level view of the pavement, speeding up the film as the car behind
the camera barely misses ob­jects in the road when it turns, passes, and, of course,
changes lanes. In the midst of this mon­tage, the director gives us an
establishing shotthat unwittingly increases our disequilibrium: the New York City skyline, with the World Trade Center intact. Filmed before 9-11-01, Changing
Lanes becomes prophetic, without even meaning to.

After
this opening sequence, the film intro­duces us to the contrasting protagonists,
cutting back and forth between Doyle (Samuel L. Jackson), a
recovering-alcoholic insurance salesman with coke-bottle glasses, and Gavin (Ben
Affleck), who, as a partner in a successful law firm, seems to have attained
the American dream with a tony office, luxurious car, beau­tiful wife, and
youthful good looks.

The
film's first words are from Doyle, who stands in a squalid row house, telling a
realtor "I think I'll make this the boys' room." We cut to the image
of boys and girls playing orchestral music in a contrastingly elegant space,
where Gavin talks into a microphone about a founda­tion that funds inner-city
youth programs. These differing approaches to the support of children intersect
as Doyle and Gavin drive to the same courthouse, Doyle in an attempt to keep
his es­tranged wife and sons in New York, Gavin to de­fend his law firm's
control of the foundation. We are given shots inside each car, where both are talking
out loud, Gavin speaking to a colleague on his handless car phone about his
court ap­pointment, and Doyle practicing to himself what he will say in court:
"Boys need their fathers." Their goals crash into each
other—literally-as both attempt to change lanes in the rain, an inci­dent which
will change the lanes of their lives.

While
Doyle's old, beat-up Toyota is com­pletely disabled, Gavin's Mercedes is still
oper­able. Not wanting to take the time to exchange insurance info, Gavin
resorts to the expediency of wealth—offering to write a blank check—ignoring
not only Doyle's exhortation that "It's important we do this right,"
but also his plea for a ride. Gavin zooms off, yelling "Better luck next time,"
not noticing that he has dropped a red file folder crucial to his case. Doyle
picks up the folder and walks toward the city in the rain, losing the chance to
gain custody of his sons when he fails to appear in court on time. Mean­while,
Gavin risks jail time if he cannot produce an important legal document that is
in the file folder Doyle now possesses.

When
Doyle discovers the value of the red folder to its owner, he faxes Gavin's own
words back to him, scrawling over one of the file's typed pages "better
luck next time"—as though in parody of "eye-for-eye" justice.
Old Testa­ment scholars assert that the biblical injunction "An eye for an
eye, and a tooth for a tooth" called for equitable retribution rather than
the intensification of violence, but Changing Lanes illustrates the
difficulty of keeping revenge from escalating. Reminding us of the endless
brutali­ties in Israel and Palestine, the retributions en­acted by Doyle and
Gavin get more and more vi­cious, until the hatred so overwhelms them that they
both forget what caused their feud in the first place. Destroying the other's
well-being eventually becomes an end in itself.

Changing
Lanes, then, asks us to consider how
to change out of the lane of revenge, showing that wealth and privilege can
offer no comforts that might temper the impulse for ret­ribution. The movie
makes explicit the differ­ence between Gavin's upper-class world and Doyle's
lower middle-class existence. Gavin works in a light-filled art-studded office
that towers above the streets below, where Doyle makes his way amidst the bleak
greys and browns of the grimy pavement, often in the rain. Unlike the refined
Gavin, Doyle often resorts to physical violence, throwing objects and punches to
express his frustration. However, the most outrageous moral lapses occur in
Gavin's law firm, whose senior partners cynically forge doc­uments to disguise
the fact that they have skimmed money from the foundation they su­pervise. As
though to illustrate that the rain falls on the poor and the rich alike—on both
Doyle in the dirty streets and the lawyers in their ele­gant offices—the film
includes a scene in which Gavin sets off the fire-sprinkler system, rainingwater down on
the pricey office decor.

Demonstrating
the failure of education and professional status to guarantee ethical behavior,
the film suggests—and retracts—"family values" as a way to change the
lanes of revenge. In per­haps the most chilling scene of the movie, Gavin joins
his wholesome-looking wife at an up-scale restaurant, where she tells him with
tender, wide-eyed sincerity that they're "partners" and that she
wants "to stand beside" him. We soon discover, however, that her
supportive words, "let me help you with this," are meant to moti­vate
his forgery of a legal document so that they can maintain their comfortable
lifestyle: "I could've lived with a moral man, but I married a Wall Street
lawyer," she says. "Can you live there with me?"

The
disturbing juxtaposition of familial love and self-serving behavior occurs in
another scene: when Gavin visits a computer hacker who, for a hefty fee, agrees
to eliminate Doyle's credit, essentially bankrupting him. As the camera enters
his bare-bones office, we witness the hacker saying on the phone, presumably to
the child who has colored the cute pictures tacked on his wall, "One
cookie before lunch is OK." Though affectionately prescribing correct behavior
for his child, the hacker has no qualms destroying another man's life.

As
the hacker gets ready to disrupt Doyle's finances, the distressed Gavin asks,
"Is there any other way?" The man at the computer replies, without a
hint of sarcasm, "Sure! Call him up and be nice to him." This hopeful
solution is sug­gested, as well, in the very next scene. While ad­dressing an
envelope containing the red file, Doyle tells a co-worker that he is
"doing the right thing" by returning the legal document to its
rightful owner. Before he can get the enve­lope delivered, however, Doyle gets
Gavin's vi­cious voice-mail about his bankruptcy, leading him to reject what he
believes is "right."

Choosing
what is "right," of course, is the only way to defuse increasingly
violent acts of retribution. Changing Lanes, however, shows us that
competing definitions of the "right" turn this simple choice into a
moral morass. When Gavin tells his colleague (and former mistress) about
Doyle's appropriation of the red file, she offers him a solution, using what
seems to be the language of morality: "Do you want what's right? What's
right is your job, your wife, your life." This self-serving definition of
"right," then, is what justifies Gavin's visit to the com­puter
hacker.

The
Janus face of "ethics" appears once again as Gavin converses with his
wife over lunch. She talks about her mother's seemingly noble decision to stay
with her husband despite knowledge of his mistress, but then she explains her
mother's motivation: "She thought it would be unethical to leave a man for
cheating on his marriage after she has enjoyed an expensive lifestyle that
depends on a man who makes his money by cheating at work." When a person
(and perhaps a nation) aligns the "right" with protecting a way of life,
ethics can easily become skewed.

Changing
Lanes exposes the ruthlessness of self-protectionism
through its temporal setting. We are told early in the film that the day is
Good Friday, preparing us for later when Gavin wan­ders into a church in the
midst of its Good Friday service. Having nearly died when Doyle successfully
sabotaged his car, Gavin enters the church in dismay. Drenched by the rain, he
has abandoned his totaled Mercedes on the same road where he had abandoned
Doyle earlier in the day. When we see him walk past Doyle's wrecked Toyota, it
seems as though he has changed lanes, or at least places, with his nemesis, who
had walked down the same rainy road that morning. As the camera follows Gavin into
the church, we see a crucifix with the suf­fering Christ and hear a hymn about
"the Savior of the World," reminding us of the one who changed lanes,
or at least places, with us. Gavin enters a confessional, telling the priest
"I came here for meaning," because "the world is a sewer, a garbage
dump": appropriate words for Good Friday, the day which memorializes the
brutal crucifixion of the only truly innocent man. Significantly, in the midst
of Gavin's visit to the church, the film cuts to Doyle and his estranged wife
talking in the squalid house he wants to buy. Between them, pasted on the back wall
of an open closet, is a familiar picture of Christ, opening his chest cavity to
show a breaking heart.

We
see neither Gavin nor Doyle looking at these images, but the presence of Christ
has nev­ertheless entered a film about the need to change the vengeful lanes of
our lives. Interestingly, of eight reviews I surveyed, each of which praises the
intelligent script and superb acting elicited by British director Roger Michell
(Persuasion, Notting Hill), not one mentions the scenes con­taining
depictions of Jesus. To my mind, the re­viewers miss the crucial point: that in
order to disrupt the escalating violence of revenge we must follow the example
of Christ, who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but who
emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.

In Changing
Lanes, the vendetta changes lanes only when both Gavin and Doyle indepen­dently
decide to take the form of servants, meeting the needs of the other rather than
serving their own self-interests. After Doyle re­turns the red folder and asks
forgiveness, Gavin tells his wife that he wants to start doing pro bono work
and "live on the edge." Then, in an echo of the scene in which Doyle
had faxed his words back to him—"Better luck next time"— Gavin speaks
his wife's words back to her: "Can you live there with me?"

By
the end of the movie we realize we have been given an exemplum of the Serenity
Prayer that we heard chanted at Doyle's Alcoholics Anonymous meeting: "God
grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to
change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Changing
Lanes suggests that knowing the difference be­tween competing definitions
of the "right" de­rives from knowing the Christ, who might well say
to us "Can you live there with me?"